Now Available: Video of CloudShell integration with CA Service Virtualization, Automic, and Blazemeter

Now Available: Video of CloudShell integration with CA Service Virtualization, Automic, and Blazemeter

Posted by Pascal Joly May 15, 2017

3 in 1! we recently integrated CloudShell with 3 products from CA into one end to end demo, showcasing our ability to deploy applications in cloud sandboxes triggered by an Automic workflow and dynamically configure CA Service Virtualization and Blazemeter end points to test the performance of the application.

Using Service Virtualization to simulate backend SaaS transactions

Financial and HR SaaS services, such as Salesforce and Workday have become de-facto standards in the last few years. Many ERP enterprise applications while still hosted on premises (Oracle, SAP…) are now highly dependent on connectivity to these external back end services. For any software update, they need to consider the impact on such back end application service that they have no control on. Developer accounts may be available but they are limited in functionalities and may not reflect accurately the actual transaction. One alternative is to use a simulated end point known as service virtualization that records all the API calls and responds as if it was the real SaaS service call.

Modeling a blueprint with CA service Virtualization and Blazemeter

We've discussed earlier on this year in a webinar about the benefits of using Cloud Sandboxes to automate your application infrastructure deployment using devOps processes. The complete application stack is modeled into a blueprint and publish to a self service catalog. Once ready for deployment, the end user or API provides any required input to the blueprint and deploys it to create a sandbox. This sandbox can then be used for completing some testing against its components. A Service virtualization component is yet a new type of resource that you can model into a blueprint, connected to the Application server template, to make this process even faster. The Blazemeter virtual traffic generator, also a SaaS application, is represented as well in the blueprint and connected to the target resource (the web server load balancer).

As an example let's consider a web ERP application using Salesforce as one of its end point. We'll use CA Service Virtualization product to mimic the registration of new Leads into Salesforce. The scenario is to stress test the scalability of this application with a virtualized Salesforce in the back end to simulate a large number of users creating leads through that application. For the stress test we used Blazemeter SaaS application to run simultaneous user transactions originating from various end points at the desired scale.

Running an End to End workflow with CA Automic

We used the Automic ARA (Application Release Automation) tool to create a continuous integration workflow to automatically validate and release end to end a new application built on dynamic infrastructure from QA stage all the way to production. CloudShell components are pulled into the workflow project as action packs and include the create sandbox, delete sandbox and execute test capabilities.

Connecting everything end to end with Sandbox Orchestration

The way everything gets connected together is by using CloudShell setup orchestration to configure the linkage between application components and service end points within the sandbox based on the blueprint diagram. On the front end, the Blazemeter test is updated with the load balancer web IP address of our application. On the back end, the application server is updated with the service virtualization IP address.

Once the test is complete, the orchestration tear down process cleans up all the elements: resources get reset to the initial state and the application is deleted.